


Jumping to Conclusions for Engineers

by Pookaseraph



Series: CMUniverse [16]
Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Carnegie Mellon University, Dungeons & Dragons, F/M, Fluff, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Pittsburgh, Wheelchairs, poor communication skills
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-12
Updated: 2012-02-12
Packaged: 2017-10-31 00:01:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/337667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pookaseraph/pseuds/Pookaseraph
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The recent changes in Charles' life make him consider branching out and making new friends on campus. The only person not on board with this is Erik.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jumping to Conclusions for Engineers

Charles rolled himself towards Mudge, Tony, Anya, and Erik's grandparents still in the X-Mobile behind them. After getting himself sorted out, Erik drove him the rest of the way to his room and the two of them could finally _relax_. He groaned when Erik climbed up onto his wheelchair and nuzzled into his neck.

"God, I'm not sure I want to spend that many hours with your family where I can't even _touch_ you ever again." He could admit that, now, out loud, because damn that had been hard, dodging Lorna, hoping Tony would drag the kids away, and after Edie had gotten home he was lucky to get Erik within five feet of him. It was impossible to deny that it hurt some, to see Erik respond that way.

"I'm sorry..." Erik sighed, head resting against Charles' shoulder and Charles just ran his fingers along his back. "I'm glad you were there."

"Me, too." He'd loved sharing dinner like that, turkey and stuffing and all of that family detritus that he and Tony hadn't really had by themselves in ages. "It was much better than we usually do. We have a pair of Hungry Man turkey dinners or something, usually, and shrimp cocktail."

Erik kissed Charles' neck before he drew back, sea blue-green eyes looking down at Charles. He let his fingers run up and down Erik's thighs, touching lightly, watching the way his boyfriend's eyes darkened in response. "We'll get... farther. _I'll_ get farther, Charles. I wish I could be ready for more." Erik bit his lip awkwardly. "I want to stay the night."

"You're always welcome to." He knew Erik wouldn't, not tonight. Erik only stayed if he could pretend he'd gotten caught up in work on campus and had slunk off to Charles' or Tony's to avoid a late-night hike up to Squirrel Hill. He wished it were that simple, though. He teased his fingers up along the hem of Erik's shirt, and Erik leaned back, letting him shuck it and send it across the room before he started to pepper kisses along his chest.

"Having you there..." Erik said, eyes fluttering closed while Charles worked. "It made it... truly family."

Charles felt his chest clench slightly at that. "Thank you, love."

Erik's words were a balm that helped soothe the worst of his anxiety. They were going to be alright... eventually. He tried not to judge Erik's reasons for feeling he needed to stay closeted, but more and more they were... hurting, just a bit. He knew Erik was trying to push past it, but it wasn't easy to wait in the meantime. If he weren't so horribly in love he might be more frustrated with it. As it stood, the love more than balanced out the frustration.

Getting to spend almost two hours kissing and licking and touching Erik also made it very worthwhile. Eventually a warning text from Tony interrupted their make out session and Erik spent some time putting himself back together and Charles spent the next hour or so slowly working his way through his evening routine, he was in bed, propped up, reading, when Tony came in.

Without preamble, Tony climbed up onto the bed, sat back and closed his eyes. "Pretty sure I'm in love with her."

Charles' hand froze over the page where he was reading, and he carefully swallowed, picked up a bookmark, marked his place, and then set the book down on his lap. He wasn't certain what to say. He settled for smiling. "Have you told her this?"

Tony shook his head, eyes wild. "Are you serious? Hives, Charles!" He was smiling, though. "Cute as hell... and she... makes me want to be better. I want to like... introduce her to Obie and... I want you to like her and..." Tony looked rather manic now, eyes wild, but his lips were curved in a soft little smile that he usually associated with robots... or himself. "I want to give her my root password."

Only Tony... 

Charles held out his arms and Tony wriggled up next to him and they became a tangle of arms and legs with Tony's shoulder pressed up against Charles'. "What if it doesn't work out?" Tony asked, pained.

"What if it does?" Charles answered immediately. He pressed a kiss to Tony's forehead and that seemed to calm him just enough.

"I'm not sure which one is scarier."

Charles felt very guilty for feeling it, but _he_ wasn't sure which one was scarier either. He wanted Tony and Anya to work out; he wanted Erik and him to work out; he was also very, very terrified of the creeping possibility that, against all odds, Tony and Anya would work out and he and Erik... that this wall that Erik had inside of him wouldn't break down. He grabbed Tony tightly and squeezed him.

"Are you alright, Charles?" Tony asked.

"Absolutely."

Normally Tony would have seen it for the lie it was, but he just hugged Charles back, silent, pondering, caught up in his own world, his own problems, and his own love. Charles wondered if it was truly possible to feel something like dread-happiness, because that was what he was feeling now.

"Has Erik come around yet?"

"No."

"He will, eventually," Charles assured him, although he wasn't completely sure of that. Erik was... a bit backwards about some things, and sometimes you just needed to accept that your baby sister was going to have sex.

"Has... um... Erik come around to..." Tony was not usually one for delicacy, but he coughed. "Sexing you appropriately?"

Charles snorted. "Between the various issues and the lack of spontaneity, no... not much." He'd thought about trying tonight, but he had no idea how long Tony and Anya were going to take and the last thing he wanted was Tony texting them mid-coitus. "Maybe this weekend."

"I'll have Anya out tomorrow," he offered.

"Yes, happy anniversary." He smiled, the two of them... the four of them really. It was ridiculous. He decided that... if they all worked out they were somehow going to have to have a double wedding. He snorted.

Tony arched an eyebrow.

"Believe me you don't want to know."

Tony pouted. Everyone always said that it was Charles who looked like a sad lost puppy when he pouted, huge blue eyes and floppy light brown hair, but Tony had one hell of a pout himself with deep and soulful brown eyes. He just usually didn't use the pout on anyone but Charles.

"I was just thinking we would need a double wedding."

Tony, surprisingly, didn't blanche or look distressed by that thought, he actually looked... thoughtful, like he was actually considering what marrying Anya might be like and Charles thought _he_ might break out into hives. "Yes."

"Yes?"

"To the double wedding, assuming Anya agrees."

For a moment Charles may have stopped breathing. "You two aren't...?"

"Well not any time soon! We have college, and PhDs and actual hard things like vacations and long distance and _family_ to deal with first but..." Tony's babble stopped mid sentence and he took a deep breath. "Yeah. I could see... in the future, over the horizon, marrying her."

Charles felt exceptionally clingy after that. Even though he wasn't feeling particularly weepy he abused his very blue, and very huge, blue eyes to get evening snuggles and sometime right around when they started to drop off to sleep, Tony finally seemed to realize what was wrong.

"Me sleeping with Anya isn't the only thing Erik will eventually come around on, Charles. The guy's crazy about you." Tony mumbled into the back of Charles' shoulder.

"He's just worried about what his family will think."

"Anya won't mind."

"Did you tell her...?"

"I didn't out either of you. I've been indoctrinating her with _Glee_ , actually." Charles snorted in response. "She asked me if it was my way of telling her I was gay."

Charles laughed louder at that. "Did you go out of your way to convince her how not gay you are?"

"I think she was pretty convinced an hour later, yes."

Tony's particularly smug and self-satisfied response made that information something that Charles put firmly on the list of things to never tell Erik. It was a delicate balance between boyfriend trust and his brother not getting his nuts ripped off. Charles didn't have any particular attachment to Tony's nuts, but he knew Tony would miss them, so Charles did his best to help keep them intact.

The next day, with Tony out on his anniversary date - an occasion that seemed to have mostly passed Erik and Charles by unremarked - Erik was stuck at home watching the children while his mother was at work. That left Charles mostly to his own devices and after a morning spin around the track and some time spent lifting in the gym, he ended up making his way through Schlag and to some of the labs to get some research time in.

Sadly, since he had no idea whether the various on campus food areas were closed for the holidays or not, he found himself having to make do out of the vending machine if he didn't want to go home to cook himself lunch, or roll around campus all day looking pathetically at various closed stores. Unfortunately they were almost all designed around the quaint idea that everyone could actually reach the coin slot.

He was on his third attempt to get a dollar bill into the machine when there was an awkward cough behind him. "Um... I could, if you don't mind?"

Charles turned, looked. There was a young man - undergrad for certain - gawky and nervous, with short cut brown hair and glasses. "Well, it's either this or wheel over to the University Center for whatever is open."

"They're open," the boy said. "It's just the pasta station..." He shrugged.

Pasta or crisps, pasta or crisps... he sighed. "Perhaps I should be good." And he put the bill back into his wallet. It was just such an annoyance to get out of Schlag. At least today he wouldn't have trouble with the hills. "Thank you for the offer though. Charles Xavier."

"Hank McCoy," the boy answered. "I've um... seen you around campus."

"I am a bit distinctive, I suppose." Hank looked like he was trying to decide if Charles was poking fun at him and Charles had to wave his hands. Clearly the boy didn't take to ragging any better than Erik did. "I mean nothing by it, Hank. If you do not mind the rather torturous route to get there, you're welcome to join me."

"You just go out..." He hooked his thumb behind him and then seemed to realize what he'd said, his thumb pointing in the direction of the long and impressive stair that was at that front of the building. "Sorry."

"That's quite alright," Charles said after a moment. It wasn't as though the boy put him in the chair. He slowly headed off towards the elevator, a few moments later Hank jogged up to keep pace with him. "Are you an undergrad here?"

"PhD candidate... second year."

"You can't be much older than I am," Charles answered.

"Seventeen..."

"My goodness, younger than I am. Undergrad at fifteen?" That made him feel a bit under-accomplished, graduating at nineteen. He contented himself with the fact that he and Tony had had quite a lot to deal with in the wake of Howard and Maria's deaths and the companies - as much as they had little executive power - did not run themselves.

"Yeah, um... Harvard. You... were my TA for Quantum Physics."

"Well now I feel a bit of a cad!" He tried to remember the boy, found he couldn't, which was peculiar because Hank was rather young, probably looked younger back when Charles had been TAing at MIT. "Were you any good?"

The boy blushed, kicked his foot against the floor. "Yeah."

"Well, then I feel absolutely no guilt in having lunch with you, obviously would have been improper when you were my student."

Charles soon realized exactly why he didn't remember Hank; he was brilliant, of course, but mousey and unassuming in the way that made people look through him. Charles liked to think he was good with people, but he really hadn't given Hank the time of day because he'd been so wrapped up in himself, taking classes, all of that. It was enough to make him feel a touch guilty.

Thankfully Hank didn't seem to mind his invisibility, and made up for it by chattering endlessly at lunch, discussing plans for research, post graduate work, his desire to do everything from aerospace engineering to electrical engineering. "Tony would love to meet you, I think."

"Oh, um..." Hank shrugged. "Maybe sometime. He just seems... intimidating."

Charles grinned. Once you'd snuggled a man in Batman PJs it was fairly impossible to find them intimidating. "Well, whenever you'd like. Tony loves a good aerospace engineer." That would completely put him on top of the future Stark-Xavier minion recruiting tally. Tony had only forked over Anya and Charles had already found Erik, which meant Hank would totally put him in the lead and Tony would owe him some sort of bioengineer. "So what do you do for fun, Hank? When you're not spending your holiday in the lab."

"I... um... run." Hank glanced down awkwardly at the chair again, and Charles vaguely wanted to shake the boy by the scruff of his neck, but he ignored it. "D&D, of course."

"Can you believe they are coming out with a fifth edition? It seems like only yesterday I was buying fourth..."

"Yeah, do you ever go to Phantom?"

"Of the Attic?" Charles finished. "No, I'm afraid they are not much for... ramps. I hear their selection is quite impressive, actually. My bo-" He bit his lip, sighed. "My buddy Erik informs me that the steps are slippery in the winter as well, fell and bruised his ass quite spectacularly."

"You're... um... not missing much anyway," Hank finally finished. Charles thought the boy was quite sweet for trying, really.

"Ah, well, it is a good thing I already have books."

Hank nodded. "Do you play? We're usually in Wean on Thursdays but our DM just broke up with his girlfriend so he's sort of..." Hank shrugged.

"In recovery?"

If anything the awkwardness inherent in Hank got even more awkward. "Well... we all like his ex-girlfriend more, he can be sort of... weird. So we just hang out and do one shots. We did one with Avatar characters last week!"

"Airbenders, I hope, not Na'vi?"

Hank's laugh said there was never any other option. "Of course. But, if you wanted to come we would love to have you."

Tony actually didn't like roleplay - out of bed, anyway - and tended to be politely interested in his Dungeons and Dragons, and not even Anya's enthusiasm for the franchise was enough to rouse Tony's interest, so Charles considered that a lost cause. "I've really never played with anyone in person before," Charles admitted.

"We're friendly," Hank said, immediately. "And... you know 4e is easy for noobs."

This was... a weirdly new feeling for Charles. Normally he had to go out of his way to find new friends. It could be difficult, people weren't necessarily off put by the chair, but he knew it left them a bit confused about how to interact with him. If Tony was going to be... Tony, and Erik was going to be... Erik, perhaps it would be best for Charles to actually cultivate friendships on campus, rather than contenting himself to a circle of three. "I'll give you my email, and perhaps we can run from time to time."

"How...?" Hank frowned, blushed again.

"My wheels are my legs, so to speak. Erik and I usually go to the gym but he's less a fan of running out on the track, and I can't wheel on a treadmill." The last time they'd gone, Erik had actually whined about his knees, which was a bit amusing, but Charles had taken pity on him and given him a leg massage.

"Oh. You want to go tomorrow morning?"

That sounded absolutely lovely.

Hank stopped by early in the morning and after Charles got changed into his exercise gear they hit the track and then afterwards Charles inflicted his slightly-sweaty presence on people over at Skibo while the two of them had coffee and Charles had a bagel and the two of them talked physics and Boston and the few things they missed about the even colder fall weather there. Hank missed the T, but Charles had to admit that as far as public transit went, Pittsburgh had a lot to recommend itself when it came to the busses. All of them had room for him, and lifts, and it was a wonderful change of pace compared to the more mercenary nature of getting on and off the T.

His new friend seemed to slowly be getting acclimated to The Chair, and although he was a good deal more awkward about it than Erik he was at least making an effort. Charles had a feeling they would have a few communication failures, but it really seemed to be the cost of friendship sometimes. Mostly Hank was brilliant in a way that was immediately recognizable to Charles and he clicked with him instantly. He could see many opportunities to geek out with the boy in his future.

Eventually Charles had headed over to the bus stop with Hank while the boy waited for a 61 bus to get back up to his rental in Squirrel Hill.

"So... will you come to D&D, do you think?"

"I rather think I will," Charles had decided it would be a nice change of pace. "Perhaps I'll spectate the first time around, but after that I would love to jump right in."

"Great! I'm sure you'll love everyone, and... we..." Hank trailed off and Charles followed his gaze to where he saw someone tall and lanky cutting across Forbes Avenue at a rather impressive clip; a few moments later he recognized the figure as Erik and he seemed to be bringing a bit of a thunder cloud with him. Rain was hardly unusual in Pittsburgh but... Erik looked stormy despite the clear fall weather.

Charles tried to remember if they'd had a date scheduled - they hadn't - and wondered what the man was doing down at school anyway.

A look at Hank found him looking particularly small despite his frame. Charles waved. Erik seemed to look slightly less irritated as he finally arrived at the bus stop, looked down at Charles, and his face finally brightened, barely. "Charles?"

"Erik! Hi. I... didn't think we were on for anything this morning, were we?"

Erik shook his head. "I just thought I would..." He trailed off, not finishing his thought, so Charles took a deep breath.

"Erik, this is Hank McCoy, Hank, my friend Erik Lehnsherr." The two men nodded at each other, Hank wary, Erik still looking annoyed. "Um... Hank here actually did his undergrad at Harvard. He's quite brilliant."

Erik apparently had nothing to say to that.

"Um... Charles, if you want to... head out it's fine. I know you wanted a shower..."

Charles turned and gave Erik a rather impressive _scowl_ , because really there was no cause for that sort of glowering behavior, he didn't want Hank to think all of his friends were intimidating or something. As far as he knew Erik actually _liked_ D &D. They could have made a thing of it, but not if Erik was going to be so... peculiar about it. "I think I will. But I will email you later today about your thoughts on propulsion mechanics. I know I lean towards the biological sciences but I do think you and Tony would have a great deal to discuss. Do you mind if I cc him?"

Hank shook his head, but was obviously still looking a bit nervous. "Sure, you can do that... I'll see you around, Charles."

He and Erik had only made it a few feet away when Erik crossed his arms to his chest and pouted. It was not a good look for him.

"Oh for goodness sake, Erik. What on Earth is the matter?"

Erik had taken up a position walking so close that Charles was a bit worried he'd roll over the man's feet. "He was... friendly." Erik said it like it was a bad thing.

"Well of course he's friendly, he's a nice boy." Suddenly, lightning struck Charles' mind and he realized what was going on, perhaps a bit late because he wasn't particularly familiar with the concept but... "You're jealous!"

The clenched line of Erik's jaw said it all.

"Erik!"

"You said we were friends."

It took another moment for the accusation to sink in. "Well of course I did. You've never much taken to the term boyfriend and there is a great deal of homoerotic subtext to be put into the phrase 'my friend', but... Erik..." He took a deep breath. "You're really being a bit silly. I've only just met Hank, and I don't exactly ride around with a rainbow sticker on my wheelchair. If you truly want I will go back over there and inform him of how very gay we are for each other, if that's what you'd like."

"No."

Charles gave a long sigh. "We're going back to my room, I'm showering, and then we will discuss this."

Erik avoided the topic completely by instead climbing on top of Charles and kissing him senseless just after he'd exited the bathroom, apologizing profusely and nuzzling into his still damp hair and the crook of his neck. After a half-dozen frantic 'I love yous', Charles couldn't help but forgive him.

"I love you, too, Erik." Charles let his fingers play over Erik's chest. "Please always believe that."

Even through their frantic kissing and their lunch down on Craig Street, Erik never once told Charles that he would like Hank to know they were dating.

Charles tried not to let it bother him.


End file.
